Recency bias
Or, why I'll never count on Substack to be my income source.
I’m a couple weeks late for Small Business Saturday, but this post will address the gap (and be non-political.)
One of those Substacks I subscribe to is the self-titled one from
I like it as a “contrarian” source of information, but I also like the honesty about his struggles as a writer. Here’s something from a recent piece that was originally destined for TER next week but I decided to promote and expand upon for today. (All emphasis in original.)This morning Substack sent me an email that told me how “Bill Rice, Jr.’s Newsletter” performed in the month of November.
According to this dispatch, I added 40 total subscribers in November, including one (1) new paid subscriber.
This email prompted me to go back and see how many total and paid subscribers I added in the same month in 2022 - when my Substack had been in existence only six weeks.
In November 2022, I added 314 total subscribers and nine (9) paid subscribers.
So with two years’ experience as a Substack author, my metric of “total subscribers added” had plummeted by 274 - a decline of 87.26 percent.
My “paid subscribers added” dropped from nine in November 2022 to one in November 2024.
I also examined my metrics from December 2022, which was a great month for my new Substack venture.
Two years ago, in one month, I added 881 (!) total subscribers, including 43 new paid subscribers. For context, in 2024, it took me seven months to add 881 subscribers.
In the last seven months, I have added a grand total of seven new paid subscribers. For more context, in the first seven months of publishing a Substack newsletter, I generated 105 new paid subscribers (15 times the number I generated in the first seven months of this year).
In one month (December 2022), I added 6 times as many paid subscribers than I’ve added in the last seven months.
These metrics, to me, meet the definition of a “disturbing trend.”
So I read all that, and his conclusion that Substack is oversaturated with authors makes some sense. But let me add my experience of nearly two decades as a blogger: you generally do your best when you are the new, cool thing. Once you get established, the growth seeks its own level.
When I started out in the spring of 2005, I probably came in at the peak of the “blog.” I just thought it would be a good way to spread my opinion, one which made sense because I could only send one letter to the editor a month and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t edit it. (If you want to read some classic writing, the site is still up on Blogspot.) A few months later, I decided to start monoblogue and the rest is history.
By the middle of 2007, I had probably hit my height as far as readership went. My SiteMeter told me I was getting about 1,500 readers a week, and that number stayed through the Rushalance I had that fall. But the advent of the social media we know and (don’t) love in Facebook and Twitter took the wind out of the sails of bloggers because people could get news from those sources. Eventually most of the bloggers gave up or started bloviating on those two sites, leaving their blogs abandoned like ttown’s right wing conspiracy has been for almost two decades.
As for this Substack, my growth pattern had some similarities. I started out with a small core number of subscribers who followed me from monoblogue and have slowly and steadily gained since. After year one I had 55 subscribers and got to 100 this past March after 21 months of trying. However, 200 came six months later, as places now recommend my work.
Right now I’m at 234, which is my peak (as of Tuesday, since I prewrite stuff like this.) Then again, it was about 2 years from birth to peak with monoblogue so maybe this is as good as it gets for me. And I’m okay with that.
But when you think about it, there is indeed a good chance that Substack as a whole has peaked as far as an enterprise where you can make a living. It’s not the new, cool thing anymore and there are already people who built up name recognition previously who are now here, such as
or Matt Taibbi of . Substack brags about all the ex-journalists who retreat back here. Given that, Michael Swartz is probably not going to ever have 1,000 paid subscribers, nor is the Substack of Bill Rice, Jr. His solution is to go with a hyperlocal blog (Troy Citizen) and hope to draw the subscribers that would normally accrue to a local small town newspaper, and I hope he succeeds. It sounds like that’s in his blood.But I have a different goal. My subscriber base is still growing slowly, and I look at each as a blessing and an opportunity. As I say on the homepage, “now my job is to turn that rocky, thorny, and trod-upon soil into ground receptive to the missionary's seed, just like in Matthew 13.” I’m happy to have paid subscribers (check out this offer) but if I make the world more suitable for spreading the Good News I consider that a win as well.
Until next time, just remember you can Buy Me a Coffee since I have a page there.